A Podcast, and Some Similes, an excerpt from “Storylife”
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. I will return to regular Iliad posts next week.
…the thing you just said about story, giving us the capacity to experience 1000 lives is one of the most important things to acknowledge about narrative, right? And so I think that one of the ways that people often talk about language and narrative is to think of it as a technology, right? If we imagine that narrative and stories are akin to our ability to use fire or, you know, to cook food and to things like that, then we can see it as something we that we use that facilitates culture, etc. But I think another way to think about it, and this is the one I’ll go back to, is the notion that stories actually do keep on living on their own.
This is an excerpt from Storylife (chapter 5), coming out next week.
When I was an undergraduate, exploring ideas for a senior thesis, I became fascinated by Homeric similes, especially those comparing heroes to people doing everyday things, as when the sides of the battle in Iliad 12 are compared to two men arguing over a boundary marker in their fields.[i] I remember pouring out theories about how these comparisons were more sophisticated than animal comparisons only to be stopped by my advisor, Lenny Muellner, when I claimed it was obvious that complex similes arose out of simple ones. Lenny asked gently why it could not be the other way around, that simple similes—e.g. “Hektor was like a lion”—did not contain within them the potential of much longer ones. And, further, should not we distinguish between what an audience listening to the Homeric poems likely knew and expected from similes and how they developed over time?
This conversation remained with me for over twenty years. I take two essential lessons from it: first, not to forget the difference between the development of a thing (here a simile) and an audience’s experience of it; and, second, how the ecology of stories contains relationships and potentials far beyond what is immediately seen. To stay with the case of similes for a moment, let’s take an extended one from Iliad 12. As the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans rages around the wall protecting the Greek ships, two captains rally their troops:
So those two yelled out to encourage the Greeks to fight And just as waves of snow fall thick on a winter’s day When Zeus the master of all urges it to snow On human beings, showing them what his weapons are like— And he reins in the winds to pour it constantly So that he covers the high mountains and the jutting cliffs As well as the flowering meadows and men’s rich fields, Snowing onto the harbors and the promontories of the gray sea, Even as the wave resists it when it strikes. But everything else Is covered beneath it whenever Zeus’ storm drives it on. That’s how the stones fell thick from both sides, Some falling against the Trojans, others from the Trojans against the Greeks and a great din overwhelmed the whole wall
Here, the weapons falling down from the Greek wall on the Trojan attackers are compared to snow. To a modern audience, a snowfall might seem peaceful or even romantic, but in Homeric poetry snow is dangerous. The comparison in this simile conveys a blanketing and overpowering blizzard of conflict, made clearer to us from a typological study of Homeric language. But contrast this with a shorter snow simile such as “Hektor went forward like a snowy mountain.”[i] This simile creates a tension between what it says literally and the meaning it conveys based on associations unarticulated at this moment. It is not that Hektor moves like some abominable snowman or stands immobile like a wintry crag, but that the ferocity of his attacks is like the blizzards raging around a mountain. Ancient commentators add that Olympus, where the gods live, is snowy and mountains are big like Hektor, while snow is terrifying.
Whether we are talking about an extended simile or a short one, there’s great potential for expanding upon what is given, for inferring meaning that is not obvious at first sight. And, as discussed in chapter 2, the framing of the simile invites audience members to integrate material from the outer narrative alongside their own lives. The compressed simile is in a way more interpretively complex: it demands an understanding of traditional meanings, of how they can be expanded and compressed, plus the inferential ability to see aggregate action over time. Thus, this poetic device provides a good opportunity to think about the biological metaphors explored in the last few chapters. A compressed simile is in a way the core material of a story, a narrative waiting to find the right environment for growth and expansion. The history of a simile type—whether we are talking about heroes as lions or weapons as snowfall—would record many expansions and compressions as the device adapted to different contexts and experienced success based on audience reception and replication. For audiences well-versed in the art form, any given image draws on this history for meaning while also relying on its overall narrative ecology for support. In a fully realized simile about snow, certain narrative aspects are ‘expressed’ while others are not, just as some genes only find expression in certain environments.
Lenny’s response to my assumptions about similes contains a kernel of a theory of narrative, of the importance of metonymy, and the crucial contribution audiences make to the creation of meaning. As discussed earlier in this book, metonymy–a part for the whole relationship—is key to oral traditional poetry and, indeed, language in general. It describes the relationship between a particular expression and its more general group. So, just as a few lines of heroic poetry evoke and also rely on a vastly larger and more complex tradition, so too an individual human being is at once a single expression of the species and a representation of the potential of the whole.
The same kind of logic applies to proverbs and traditional narratives, how scant details in a pattern are suggestive of a larger inheritance, once we learn to see the manifestation of detail for what it is: engagement with specific environments and expectations. So, in the simile pair we find material ready for comparison to the natural world: how a string of data expressed in one sample is compressed and latent in another, requiring a larger narrative ecology of minds to unpack, adapt, and evolve once more. As we read or hear these similes we open them up in our imagination and expand them, allowing them to combine with what we know or remember from other stories and our experiences to find their meanings. And just as living creatures change the environments they inhabit, so too do these narratives change us. We are hosts to replicating phenomena: we are part of their life cycles just as they are crucial to ours.
A book on epic language, mythical narratives, and living things
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. I will return to regular Iliad posts next week.
Storylife comes out officially January 14th, but available for pre-order. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page. I am happy to talk about this book in person or over zoom.
What is Storylife?
Preface:
“One of the questions I posed to myself before and after writing this book is how I would answer my own children’s (potential) future question: What did I do when the world was ending?”
Storylife applies biological analogies to Homeric poetry and early myth to explore how narrative develops independent of individual human intention and to propose that stories have an agency of their own. It uses the architecture of Homeric language in particular—which is repetitive and often characterized as formulaic—as a case study for how complex structures and thought can develop from smaller structures in a fashion similar to multicellular life. The investigation moves from the structure of language and life to analogies from parasitism and virology to understand the relationship between human communities and the stories they tell. Greek epic and myth provide test cases for how stories change to fit audience ‘ecosystems’ and how their environments are reshaped in turn. Discussions range from parallel narrative evolutions, to viral explosions in ideas, and to the dangerous side of stories in mass shootings and war.
Storylife asks readers to rethink human creativity, the importance of collective actions (and reactions) and the lives we build together with and against narrative. It asks audiences to reconsider how much we control over stories and, in closing, how we should educate ourselves once we acknowledge the power that narrative exerts over us.
From the Conclusion
“The ancient Greek word that gives us poet—poiētēs—is an agent noun from a verb that can mean “make, create, do” (poieō). Poem, also formed from the same root, adds a material suffix –ma to mean a “made thing” or a “creation.” These terms can be translated appropriately in literary senses as “composer” and “composition,” but the side of me that leans toward the mystical also likes thinking of a poet as a maker and poems as worlds, stories as universes waiting for their unveiling.”
The introduction provides a brief overview of the Homeric Problem and modern concepts of authorship alongside a discussion of teleological misreadings of evolution and human cognition. The discussion touches upon artificial intelligence and the appearance of design, before exploring different metaphors for how narrative like Homeric epic develops and functions in the world: (1) a symphony; (2) a tree in a garden; and (3) a virus, to help us understand how humans and stories evolve alongside one another.
From the introduction:
“This book unfolds as a re-exploration through Homeric poetry of the analogy of narrative and its parts as living (or quasi-living)things…The weak form of my argument is that this analogy helps us understand the complexity of meaning making; the strong form is that narrative has an agency and purpose of its own, and we are merely part of its environment.”
Chapter One. Scripts for Life: From DNA to Poetic Formula
Chapter 1 draws on basic principles of genetics and linguistics to suggest to explore language morphology and semantic meaning. It emphasizes communicative context as an ecosystem that provides epigenetic triggers to shape both narrative form and content. The chapter will invite readers to consider classic problems in Homeric language not as mistakes or errors but instead as examples of vestigial structures. The chapter includes an overview of the digamma in early Greek and a lengthy discussion of the dual forms of the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9.
From Chapter 1:
“Imagine if we considered the oldest DNA in our bodies to be our authentic character, rather than some element that has persisted over time, contributing in ways we do not always understand to who we are now. This is what it is like when scholars identify “older” parts of Homeric language and attempt to date poems relatively or in some way downgrade and privilege aspects of language by mere comparison. It tells us nothing true about the whole.”
Chapter Two. Recombinations and Change: Ring Structures in Nature and Speech
Chapter 2 considers how the building blocks of life tend to assemble in larger structures. Building on patterns from early multi-cellular life to structures dictated by the laws of physics, this chapter focus in particular on how larger, composite structures in Greek poetry expand on smaller elements, like doublets, triplets, and rings alongside formulae and type scenes. The chapter concludes by suggesting that ring structures offer a compositional reflection of cognitive engagement with narrative, using Sappho fr. 16 and the story of Meleager in the Iliad as examples.
From Chapter 2
“….Ringed structures make propositions, they tell stories, they attempt speech acts such as persuasion and praise. But these rings are also part of the paratactic structure of epic poetry: they accumulate and advance meaning as they progress, and they invite audiences to compare the demarcated part with other sections and the larger whole.”
Chapter Three. Crabs and the Monomyth: Parallel Evolutions and Mythical Patterns
Chapter 3 takes a closer look at how patterns of stories are repeated over time. Through the multiple evolutions of crab morphology, this chapter uses parallel and convergent evolution as analogies to think about narrative repetitions and similarities. The discussion focuses first on Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” and similar approaches before turning to the Gilgamesh poems, Homeric epics, and John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream” as specific examples. The chapter closes with a reflection on biodiversity and cultural diversity as an explanation for the so-called “Greek Miracle”.
From chapter 3
“Long before humans started writing about narratives and identifying their parts, we knew that stories had power and cultivated them for it. Human intervention has shaped narrative in much the same way as we have shaped agricultural crops and domesticated animals. Evolution does not stop because of domestication; instead it moves at a different pace and alters the agents of domestication as well. Humankind and human culture have been inalterably changed by the changes we have wrought on other species.”
Chapter Four. Going Viral: Big Deeds and Bad Fame
Chapter 4 explores the relationship between story and human culture in the world by examining kleos in Homer, Archaic Greek and Greek inscriptions from the perspective of mutualism, parasitism, and viral growth. The discussion emphasizes how the discourse of fame can have a range of outcomes for human communities.
From chapter 4
“There are two reasons why the rhetoric of fame fits well in a discussion of symbiosis. The first is that kleos narratives clearly seem to shift to fit their environment and to have a real impact on the people who tell and hear them. The second is that kleos appears to offer new life through the generation of new stories.”
Chapter Five. Symbiosis and Paradigm: What Stories Do in the World
Chapter 5 continues with biological examples of mutualism and parasitism, emphasizing a symbiotic scale and how relationships can change over time from beneficial to harmful. This chapter then provides interpretations of the Iliad and Odyssey that foreground the poems’ own understanding of how dangerous stories can be in the world. The final part of the chapter will return to how myths can go terribly wrong, discussing the hero Kleomēdēs the Astupalaian and the example of school shootings in the U.S. (especially Columbine).
From chapter 5
“If we accept that the problem of mass violence is not simply one of individual mental health but also part of a deficiency in our social order, in the long term we need to change the stories we tell about ourselves and each other; we need to educate our community about how narratives condition us; and we need to consider whether our social organization allows people to live lives of meaning.”
Conclusion. Inoculation and the Limits of Analogy
The conclusion takes the analogy of story as a living thing one step further, asking readers to think about the relationship between the stories we tell and the way we act in the world and what happens when they become parafunctional. The second part of the conclusion offers a survey of other approaches to narrative and challenges to narrativity, like that from Galen Stawson and E. M. Cioran. Authors discussed include: Jonathan Gottshalk, Mark Turner, Yuval Harari, Benjamin Labatut, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Peter Brooks, Angus Fletcher, Robert Shiller, Florian Fuchs, and Liu Cixin. The book closes with brief proposals for educating a world we share with narrative.
From the acknowledgements: Many people make books:
Particular parts of the book were improved in talks given at the Greek Literature and the Environment Workshop, UCSB, the University of Chicago Rhetoric and Poetics, Homer Lecture, and work presented at the Brandeis Psychology department colloquia series… Some of the ideas and passages also appeared in pieces for The Conversation or Neos Kosmos.
I owe a debt to many for help with bibliography and subjects beyond my expertise, including Joseph Cunningham, Sophus Helle, Prasad Jallepalli, Dan Perlman Seth Sanders, Claudio Sansone and Mario Telo. I cannot thank Eric Blum, Becca Frankel, and Talia Franks enough for editing and bibliographical assistance. Among the many friends who have supported my flights of fancy over the years, I would be remiss not to thank Lenny Muellner, Mimi Kramer, Justin Arft, Elton Barker, Celsiana Warwick, Julio Vega-Payne, Anna Hetherington, Paul O’Mahony, Sarah Bond, and Larry Benn, all of whom read drafts of or discussed various parts of this book and provided needed encouragement. Special thanks are due to my editor Heather Gold who provided the focus and the framework to help turn a half-baked idea into a full manuscript. Elizabeth Sylvia also provided invaluable editorial support,, and Susan Laity’s careful eye improved the book’s prose and style immeasurably.
And, as always, my spouse, Shahnaaz, deserves the final word—my belief in the future and any confidence I have starts with her.
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad, but it is not about the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations.This will be the last post of the year. I will return next week with posts on the Iliadand—be forewarned—a few posts about a book I have coming out in 2025.
The news of Christopher Nolan’s plans to film a version of the Odyssey in mid-2016 has overshadowed the straight-to-video release of Pasolini’s The Return, which spent a few lonely weeks in limited theaters before showing up on streaming services.
Nolan’s Odyssey could be remarkable, an oddity, or a boondoggle worthy of Cleopatra (1963). But what it does promise is that the epic will stay center-stage for a few more years, continuing a run that started with Emily Wilson’s translation (2018), has seen several Odyssey dedicated monographs in the same period (Alex Loney’s The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey, 2019; Justin Arft’s Arete and the Odyssey’s Poetics of Interrogation: The Queen and Her Question, 2022; and my own The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic, 2020, now available open access) and a new major translation coming out next year from Daniel Mendelsohn. Oh, I am also editing a 24 essay volume for Oxford University Press that should be out in 2026. And this list leaves out the impact of non-scholarly works like Madeline Miller’s Circe or the ongoing excellence of Epic! The Musical.
This cultural moment is also marked by how quickly fraught the discussions become. I bring up Wilson’s translation in conjunction with the announcement of Nolan’s project here because on twitter (and other places) the news was met with some hand-wringing over whether people should be expected to have read the Odyssey and then a misogynistic rehash of the ‘debate’ over Wilson’s translations. I have little to add to this other than to say most of the combatants show their allegiances pretty quickly and that Wilson’s translations are just fine. I can’t say I have read a single criticism that isn’t ideologically motivated in some way.
If I can’t mount a defense of any translation with enthusiasm, it’s because translations are not meant for me. Every generation (at least) needs a new translation because our own language changes quickly and our understanding of epics change too. Wilson’s translations read quickly and clearly; if I have any qualm with them it is that they are insufficiently engaged with Homeric scholarship. But, let’s be honest, there’s more than a drop of narcissism in that concern. I’ve taught the Odyssey with Lattimore, Fagles, Wilson, and Lombardo. As with any text in any class, the success relies in part on the skills of the instructor and their knowledge of the work in question. The vast majority of the criticism I have read about Wilson’s Odyssey is aimed at the very things she gets right.
I don’t want to use this post to talk about translations: to end the year, I want to revisit, in brief, my review of the Odyssey movie on offer (The Return) and recycle my small intervention in the discussion on ‘reading’ the Odyssey from social media.
Unrecorded Artist, “Eurykleia (Odysseus’ former nurse) washing Odysseus’s feet,” Terracotta c. 450 BCE, Greek, Melian, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, NY (CC0).
The Return
Last week, Hyperallergic released a review I wrote on The Return, entitled The Return is a Shabby CliffNotes Version of the Odyssey. (Super HT to Sarah Bond for making the connection, encouraging me, and editing an early draft!) As anyone who writes for the public knows, you don’t often get to choose your own title. My original title was “Nobody Returns Home”, which aimed to get to the heart of this version of the Odyssey: in its odd choices it may unintentionally reflect more about our period and beliefs than it ever could about ancient audiences.
The Return is good enough of a movie to warrant watching and maybe even rewatching, but it is not the Odyssey. And the the extent to which it is not the Odyssey got under my skin enough that I wrote a harsher review than I might have, partly because I really wanted to like the film. (For more: in a few weeks I will be recording a podcast with the Movies We Dig! Crew, sparring with Amy Pistone and Joe Goodkin). I had to cut a few key paragraphs from an overlong review because they tried to make too many arguments (I took 10 pages of handwritten notes while watching the film). So, instead of leaving them where they belong on the cutting room floor, here they are with some thoughts about what they were doing and why I cut them.
Dora Wheeler Keith, “Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night” (1886), silk embroidered with silk thread, 45 x 68 in. (114.3 x 172.7 cm), held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (image via Wikimedia Commons)
Original thesis: everyone adapts the Odyssey and reads themselves into it. Variations and doubt were part of the tradition and should still be part of it.
Playing with just who Odysseus and his family were is a part of this tradition first established by Homer: from the lost epic the Telegony that tells of the awkward homecoming of the hero’s son with Circe to Euripides’ satyr-play the Cyclops, or accounts from the travel writer Pausanias that have Odysseus rejecting Penelope and sending her home to her father. Or, worse, an ancient scholar reports in interpreting the hellenistic poet Lykophron’s Alexandra that Penelope had sex with all of the suitors and gave birth to the god Pan (the joke here being that “pan” means everyone/everything in Greek).
There was just too much going on here that needed to be glossed and the misogyny in bringing up the Lykophron stuff was just not worth it.
Thesis 2: Most people think they know the Odyssey. The know some scenes from the legends around Odysseus that our Homeric epic actually toys with.
Some of the most memorable scenes to be found in Homer’s Odyssey are not shown in the film, which as the name suggests, is only focused on Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca. This includes his blinding of the cyclops, his overcoming of the sorceress Circe, or his resourcefulness in withstanding the charms of the Sirens’ song. This is as true today anecdotally–these are always the scenes my students seize upon when they recall Odysseus’ journey. Even in ancient art, such tales of monsters are privileged over the more mundane, if bloody, return of Odysseus.
This is a fine note but turned out to have nothing really to do with this film. But taking this out meant the following had to go too:
Because these monsters tend to steal the scenes, it is often all the more jarring for modern audiences when they read the first ten lines or so of the Homeric epic. They tell of a mortal manwho tried really hard to save his companions from deaths on a disastrous journey home. At its beginning, The Odyssey says nothing about monsters or Odysseus’ characteristic wit as it starts to tell his tale; it doesn’t even mention Odysseus’ wife Penelope and their son, Telemachus, or the travails they undergo at the hands of the suitors. It asks its audience to think about a man who tried and failed to bring his people home, all the while inviting us to consider more than once how human beings make their fate worse than it has to be.
I really wanted to emphasize this mortals make their fate worse than it has to be bit because it is central to my own work on the Odyssey but it didn’t fit with the review, so I cut it.
Thesis 3: The Odyssey is unfilmable. Epic is unfilmable. It is too long, to based in an aural aesthetic that is ruined by putting it on the screen and its narrative is too associative.
Given the sheer number of events, characters, and themes, the Odyssey is ultimately unfilmable. Perhaps a prestige television series with 12-24 episodes could do it some justice–but adapting the Odyssey’s eighteen hours of recited verse to two hours of video run time would be a fool’s game. The creators of this year’s The Return are not fools. They only focus on the actions from Odysseus’ arrival on Ithaca to his reunion with his Penelope. Only 11 books of 24.
Why review a film on a book if you think the entire enterprise is impossible? It seems silly and futile. Cut!
Thesis 4: Everything is Odysseus’ fault and no one recognizes this but me!
A close second detail students remember about the Odyssey is that the action is about a veteran father coming home to exact vengeance against the suitors who have ravaged his home and terrorized his wife and son. As more than one critic has noted, there’s something very American Western about this theme, culminating in violence that is darkly retributive, as in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven or more obscenely violent, like something Quentin Tarantino would imagine. But this framing is in part a great simplification. A close reading of Homer’s epic recognizes that Odysseus is in part to blame for what happens to his family. If he hadn’t blinded the Cyclops and boasted about it, sharing his name, he would not have been waylaid so long. The suitors don’t arrive until he has been gone 17 years; he washes up on Calypso’s island in year 13.
That’s actually part of the point of this movie and many, many people know this besides me
The editorial team at Hyperallergic did a good job making my review coherent. It came out a little harder than I had intended, but let’s see how it ages…
Reading The Odyssey
Some of my simplified tips for reading the Odyssey and avoiding the nonsense discourse online
1. I think almost no one in antiquity ‘read’ Homeric epic from beginning to end. They listened to episodes and then in later periods read excerpted passages. It would have been rare to experience either epic from beginning to end
2. No one would have gone to reading the epic from beginning to end without prior knowledge of the characters and plots, the backstories and variations
3. This makes what we do with Homer absolutely anachronistic and weird. It also makes it really hard for modern students (and non-students) to get through the epics
Fortunately, there are ways to handle this!
1. Read a summary first. It’s ok! Epic is about the unfolding of basically known plots, the how of the journey rather than the stops. Ancient summaries like those from Apollodorus are great, but try out Natalie Haynes’ 27 minute version
3. Listen to an audiobook version. Epics are for listening! Take time doing it.
4. Try out different translations. I teach with Lombardo, Wilson works great. Fagles and Lattimore are getting harder to teach with, but that depends on the dialect and reading experience of the audience. If one doesn’t work, try another.
5. Try using a free online performance: there’s a reading of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey by 72 actors:
“You know that somewhere Timo the Philasian calls the Museum a birdcage as he mocks the scholars who are supported there because they were fed like the priciest birds in a big cage:
Many are fed in many-peopled Egypt,
The paper-pushers closed up waging endless war
in the bird-cage of the Muses.
“It would not be sweet for me to write about the relative age of Homer and Hesiod, even though I have worked on the problem as closely as possible. This is because I am familiar with the fault-finding character of others and not the least of those who dominate the study of epic poetry in my time.”
“And, you, my grammarians who do not inquire into these sorts of things, I quote from Herodicus the Babylonian:
Flee, Aristarcheans, over the wide back of the sea
Flee Greece, men more frightened than the brown deer,
Corner-buzzers, monosyllabists, men who care about Sphin and sphoin and whether its min or nin*.
This is what I would have for you storm-drowned men:
But may Greece and God-born Babylon always wait for Herodicus.
And, to add another, the words of the comic poet Anaxandrides:
…It brings pleasure
Whenever someone discovers some new notion,
To share it with everyone. But those who at first
Keep it to themselves have no judge for their skill
And are later despised. For it is right to offer the mob
Everything anyone might think is brand-new.
The majority of them departed at these words and slowly the party disbanded.”
“It would be annoying to list all the people who spent their lives pursuing board games, ball games, or sunbathing. Men whose pleasures are so busy are not at leisure. For example, no one will be surprised that those occupied by useless literary studies work strenuously—and there is great band of these in Rome now too. This sickness used to just afflict the Greeks, to discover the number of oars Odysseus possessed, whether the Iliad was written before theOdyssey, whether the poems belong to the same author, and other matters like this which, if you keep them to yourself, cannot please your private mind; but if you publish them, you seem less learned than annoying.”
Persequi singulos longum est, quorum aut latrunculi aut pila aut excoquendi in sole corporis cura consumpsere vitam. Non sunt otiosi, quorum voluptates multum negotii habent. Nam de illis nemo dubitabit, quin operose nihil agant, qui litterarum inutilium studiis detinentur, quae iam apud Romanos quoque magna manus est. Graecorum iste morbus fuit quaerere, quem numerum Ulixes remigum habuisset, prior scripta esset Ilias an Odyssia, praeterea an eiusdem essent auctoris, alia deinceps huius notae, quae sive contineas, nihil tacitam conscientiam iuvant sive proferas, non doctior videaris sed molestior.
And self loathing eventually takes over.
Palladas of Alexandria, Greek Anthology 9.169
“The wrath of Achilles has become for me,
a scholar, the cause of destructive poverty.
Would that this rage had left me with the Danaans slain
before academia’s bitter deprivation left its stain.
Yet, to allow Agamemnon to steal Briseis
and Paris take Helen, I became a beggar instead.”
Book 13 splits almost easily into three parts. Poseidon’s actions echo the events of book 13 and Hera’s seduction of Zeus, which involves Poseidon to the extent that he will be rallying the Greeks during Zeus’ distraction, seems almost as if it could be an entirely independent episode. There are some interwoven themes, however: the foolishness of Agamemnon at the beginning of the book could be seen to anticipate Zeus’ own failures as a leader during the seduction scene, while the coalition of wounded Greek leaders joining together at the book’s beginning is balanced by the efforts of the second rank of Trojan leaders (especially Sarpedon and Polydamas) to defend Hektor and lead the Trojans after Hektor falls).
Structure of Iliad 14
1-133 Nestor and the Council of Kings
134-360 Seduction of Zeus
361-522 Rallying of Greeks, wounding of Hektor
The first portion of this book echoes two earlier scenes that help to characterize the Achaean political organization. In both books 2 and 9, Agamemnon expresses a desire to depart and this triggers a response that reaffirms a larger will to stay. In book 2, he ‘tests’ the army and they run to the ships, only to be restrained and rallied by Odysseus and Nestor. In book 9, he again suggests fleeing, only to be opposed by Diomedes and then redirected by Nestor. At the beginning of book 14, all of the best of the Achaeans are sidelined from battle. Here, Nestor is drawn into action by the sound of battle and when he asks Agamemnon for a plan, that glorious son of Atreus, proposes that the wounded leaders withdraw into a ship and row out into the bay and await nightfall.
Elton Barker and I wrote an article comparing Agamemnon’s claim that “there’s no criticism for running away, not even in the night” (οὐ γάρ τις νέμεσις φυγέειν κακόν, οὐδ’ ἀνὰ νύκτα, 14.80) with the new Archilochus fragment where the speaker runs away from Telephos along with Archilochus’ shield poem. We argue that the common strains are evidence of something of a poetic tradition of debating bravery and self-preservation, emphasizing that Homer and Archilochus are engaged with rhetorical repositioning in response to each other.
Masque funéraire, connu sous le nom de « masque d’Agamemnon ». Or massif, trouvé dans la Tombe V du site de Mycènes par Heirich Schliemann en 1876.
(As Melissa Mueller effectively argues in her recent book on Sappho and Homer, there’s great interpretive advantage to putting Lyric/Elegiac poets in a non-hierarchical relationship with each other. In our work, Elton and I have tried to emphasize that because of the nature of composition in performance and the many versions of any tale that were told previous to textualization, it is just as likely that our version of Homer is responding to ideas extant in Archilochus and Sappho as it would be that Sappho and Archilochus are responded to the Homeric text we have.)
Agamemnon presents an unheroic plan unbecoming to the leader of the army. He attempts to use proverbial sounding language justifying retreat in the face of considerable danger in a context in which his retreat would doom the army. Rather than presenting a Tyrtaeus/Callinus shaming speech, declaring that only cowards run and they’re likely to die anyway, Odysseus focuses on the larger picture:
Iliad 14.83-102
‘Son of Atreus, what kind of word has escaped the bulwark of your teeth? You’re a disaster, I wish that you would order some other unfit army, that you didn’t rule us, those for whom Zeus has assigned work over harsh wars from youth right up to old age, until each of us perishes. Do you really desire to abandon in this way the wide-wayed city of the Trojans, for which we have suffered many evils? Be quiet! Lest any one else of the Achaeans hear this plan which no man, at least, would ever release from his mouth, a man who knows how to utter fit things in his thoughts, a scepter-bearing man and one to whom the host assents, the size of the host you rule over among the Achaeans. Now I question your thoughts altogether, what sort of thing you have spoken, you who call us, when the war and strife have been joined, to drag the well-benched ships to the sea, so that more still to boast over might occur for the Trojans who have already overpowered us, and harsh ruin might fall over us. For the Achaeans will not withstand the war while the ships are dragged to the sea, but they will look back at us and forget their battle-lust. There, then, leader of the host, your plan will destroy us.’
Agamemnon seated on a rock and holding his sceptre, identified from an inscription. Fragment of the lid of an Attic red-figure lekanis by the circle of the Meidias Painter, 410–400 BC. From the contrada Santa Lucia in Taranto. Stored in the Museo Nazionale Archeologico in Taranto (Italy).
Odysseus warns Agamemnon that this is the kind of man that will lead to the very outcome he has lamented on more than one occasion (that he will destroy his own Army). His language is aggressive and also transgressive: he uses bare imperatives, repetitions, insults, and rhetorical questions to reprimand Agamemnon. This scene is, in a way, an inversion of book 2: Nestor starts the questions, Agamemnon says something foolish, and Odysseus puts him in his place. Odysseus can be harsher here because this is the equivalent of a small council (a boulê) where the leaders speak more frankly and directly to each other than if the entire army were listening. Agamemnon backs down quickly in the face of Odysseus’ onslaught:
Iliad 14. 103-108
“Then, Agamemnon the Lord of Men answered him. “Odysseus, you’re laying into me with reproach so hard! For my part I won’t order the unwilling sons of the Achaeans To drag their well-benched ships back into the sea. But I wish there were someone here who could lay out a plan Better than this one. Someone young or old. This would be welcome to me.”
Earlier in the epic speakers have been valued for their age—as Nestor himself makes clear when he responds to Diomedes in book 9 and tells him that he “has not reached the end of speech” since he is so young. Here, in a moment of desperation, Agamemnon basically says he needs a good idea and he doesn’t care where it comes from. The hero who stands up with a better idea is none other than Diomedes. And he’s has a little bit to say first.
Iliad, 14.109-133
Then among them spoke Diomedes, good at the war-cry: ‘The man is near, let us not waste any more time; if you wish to consent, then may none of you entertain anger because I am indeed the youngest by birth among you. I also claim to be the offspring of a noble father, Tydeus, whom the heaped-up earth covers in Thebes. For, three blameless children were born to Portheus and in Pleurôn and steep Kalydon lived Agrios and Melas, and the third child was the horseman Oineus the father of my father—and he was conspicuous among them for virtue. Although he remained there, my father lived in Argos, driven there, for this, I guess, is how Zeus and the other gods wished it. He married one of Adrêstos’ daughters, and inhabited a house rich for living—he had sufficient grain-bearing ploughlands and around these there where many orchards full of fruit, and he possessed many flocks. He surpassed all the Achaeans with the spear—you all must have heard these things, if they’re true. Hence, do not, by claiming that my birth, at least, is low and cowardly, disregard the speech that is offered, the one I will speak. Let us go again to the war, even though we are wounded by necessity. But, when there, let us keep ourselves out of the strife of the missiles, lest anyone somehow receive a wound on top of a wound. Let us rally the others and send them into battle, even those who before gave into their impulse to hang back and not fight.’
Where Diomedes starts his response to Agamemnon in book 9 by complaining about how the king has impugned his bravery and fighting effort before, here he also talks about his genealogy. Diomedes may be responding in part to Agamemnon’s earlier use of Tydeus as an example to shame him to fight harder. But he is also setting his story alongside the famous tales of these famous heroes’ families. Genealogical bona fides occupy the vast majority of these speech even after Agamemnon has so directly said he just needs a better plan.
I would go so far as to suggest that Diomedes is working within the confines of the previous speeches: he has been qualified as a warrior not up to his father’s measure in book 4, and yet in book 9 he was criticized for being too young. Here he seems to imply again that his father’s excellence is a necessary but insufficient quality for his own authority to speak. What he specifies about his father’s place is his acceptance into another city and people (Argos, closer to Agamemnon in the Peloponnese) and his high position in that new kingdom. For me, the key to this somewhat unclear logic is the superlative “youngest”—perhaps, Diomedes is saying that just as his father proved himself a useful stranger among the Argives, so too Diomedes’ difference in youth marks him out among the Achaean leaders.
Busts of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Hector in Conference (from Scenes from The Story of The Trojan War), South Netherlandish, probably produced through Pasquier Grenier of Tournai (MET, 55.39)
As I write in my dissertation, this scene is one of several that shows the difference in Greek politics in the Iliad is that there are multiple leaders endowed with the authority to speak and advise (in contrast to the Trojans). In revisiting this exchange, moreover, I think it shows much more internal echoing with the earlier political scenes and Diomedes’ exchange with Agamemnon in book 4. Following Odysseus’ abuse, I would dare argue that Agamemnon says “either young or old” because he wants to hear from someone else and might be apologetically opening the door to Diomedes.
A Short bibliography on Diomedes
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Andersen, Öivind. 1978. Die Diomedesgestalt in der Ilias. Oslo.
Barker, Elton T. E. “Achilles’ Last Stand: Institutionalising Dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” PCPS 50 (2004) 92-120.
—,—. Entering the Agôn: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford, 2009.
Burgess, Jonathan. 2001. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore.
—,—. 2009. The Death and Afterlife of Achilles. Baltimore.
Christensen, Joel P. 2009. “The End of Speeches and a Speech’s End: Nestor, Diomedes, and the telos muthôn.” in Kostas Myrsiades (ed.). Reading Homer: Film and Text. Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 136-62.
Christensen, Joel P. and Barker, Elton T. E.. “On not remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the contest for Thebes.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici, no. 66, 2011, pp. 9-44.
Christensen, Joel P. 2015. “Diomedes’ Foot-wound and the Homeric Reception of Myth.” In Diachrony, Jose Gonzalez (ed.). De Gruyter series, MythosEikonPoesis. 2015, 17–41.
Gantz, Timothy. 1993. Early Greek Myth. Baltimore.
Griffin, Jasper. 1980. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—,—.2001. “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer.” in Cairns 2001: 363-84.
Hammer, Dean.“‘Who Shall Readily Obey?” Authority and Politics in the Iliad.” Phoenix 51 (1997) 1-24.
—,—. “The Politics of the Iliad.” CJ (1998) 1-30.
—,—. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Irene J. F. de Jong. “Convention versus Realism in the Homeric Epics.” Mnemosyne 58, no. 1 (2005): 1–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4433613.
Kakridis, Johannes Th. 1949. Homeric Researches. Lund.
Kakridis, Phanis, J. 1961. “Achilles’ Rüstung.” Hermes 89: 288-97.
Lohmann, Dieter. 1970. Dieter Lohmann. Die Komposition der Reden in der Ilias. Berlin.
Mühll, Peter von der. 1952. Kritisches Hypomena zur Ilias. Basel.
Nagy, Gregory. 1979. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore.
Nickel, Roberto. 2002. “Euphorbus and the Death of Achilles.” Phoenix 56: 215-33.
Pache, Corinne. 2009. “The Hero Beyond Himself: Heroic Death in Ancient Greek Poetry and Art.” in Sabine Albersmeir (ed.). Heroes: Mortals and Myths in ancient Greece. Baltimore (Walters Art Museum): 89-107.
Redfield, James. 1994. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hektor. Chicago.
—,—. 2001. “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse.” in Cairns 2001: 311-41.
Rose, P. W. “Thersites and the Plural Voices of Homer.” Arethusa 21 (1988) 5-25.
—,—. “Ideology in the Iliad: Polis, Basileus, Theoi.” Arethusa 30 (1997) 151-99.
At Olympia. Plato claims in the Phaedrus that a metal Colossos was set up next to the dedication of the Kypselids at Olympia. But they claim that this from Kypselos himself and not the Kypselids. Agaklutos speaks about this in his On Olympia. “An ancient temple of Hera, dedicated by the Skillians. Those people are Eleians. Inside the temple is a gold colossus, a dedication from Kypselos of Korinth. For people say that Kypselos promised that if he should become tyrant of the Korinthians, then he would make everyone’s property sacred for ten years. Once he collected the taxes from this sacred assessment, he had the metal colossus created.”
Didymos, however, reports that Periander, his son, had the colossus made to restrain the luxury and audacity of the Korinthians. Theophrastus also reports in the second book of his Magic Moments, “while others spend funds on more masculine affairs, like raising an army and conquering enemies, as Dionysius the tyrant did. For he believed that it was necessary not only to waste others’ money but also his own in order to make sure that there would be no funds for plots against him. The pyramids of Egypt and the colossus of the Kypselids and all those kinds of things have similar or identical designs.
It is also reported that there was an an epigram on the colossus: “If I am not a colossus made of gold / then may the race of the Kypselids be wiped away.”
Apellas of Pontos, however, claims that he inscription was, “If I am not a solid-cold Colossus, may the race of Kypselids be completely destroyed”
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations.
At the beginning of book 13, soon after the Trojans have broken through the Greek fortifications around their ships, Poseidon intervenes in the action and rallies the Greeks to defend themselves. The intervention, however, has a few interesting features that may reflect on how we understand the gods’ functions in epic.
The Homeric gods are simultaneously representations of divine forces/entities who may (or may not) have reflected audiences beliefs and also actors in and upon the plot of epic. By intersecting between these two domains, they can also offer metaphysical and epistemological reflections, by which I mean, the limits of what humans can do and know and what the nature of the world between mortal and god may be. This reflection is, to be fair, more an issue of refraction (to borrow Donna Wilson’s term from her 2002 book).
When it comes to divine intervention, as I have mentioned before, I think part of what we are supposed to be inspired to consider as audience members is the interplay between human agency and determinism. The feature of double determination, where actions are given divine and human causes, for example, allows us to see both how events look from the divine perspective and how they might look from a mortal one. The reason I use the word ‘refraction’ here is that Homer does not have a single or simple way the human and divine worlds engage: it shifts throughout the epic, now here and there, inviting audiences to consider different ways of framing causality, fate, and human action.
Agrigento. C. 470 BCE Poseidon shaking hands with Theseus
The intervention in this book introduces metanarrative features of divine presence as well. Readers have long observed that divine viewing shapes the way the audience may see the action: gods comment on mortal events, meddle in them, and train the audience’s gaze from one place to another. This scene is especially interesting because Poseidon’s action is the result of his viewing of the action alongside his rooting interest in the outcome of the game. But in addition to that, Poseidon also intervenes indirectly: he takes on the guise of a mortal and even seems to play the part by imitating what the mortal might be likely to say. As such, this seen may have mimetic implications, by which I mean it may provide insights into how Homeric poetry thinks both about the characterization of individual heroes and how it imagines audience members reading the epic’s action.
Iliad 13.39-45
“The Trojans were churning like whirlwinds or a gale As the followed Priam’s son Hektor insatiably Shouting, screaming—they imagined they would take The Achaeans ships and kill all the best men among them. But the earthshaker Poseidon who grips the land Rose from the deep sea to urge the Argives on, Putting on the appearance and tireless voice of Kalkhas”
A scholion explains Poseidon’s choice as “since he was about to speak against Agamemnon on Achilles’ behalf, he is disguised as Kalkhas to make it more believable” ἐπεὶ ὑπὲρ ᾿Αχιλλέως κατὰ ᾿Αγαμέμνονος μέλλει λέγειν (sc. Ν 107—14), πρὸς τὸ πιστωθῆναι Κάλχαντι εἴκασται, schol. bT ad Il 13.45 ex. B). The scholion’s explanation here is more than a little disappointing. It reads into Poseidon’s choice the content of his subsequent speech—and not even the immediate one in which he addresses the two Ajaxes. Soon after that, he finds Teucer, and Lêitos, Pêneleon, Thoas, Dêipuros, Mêrionês, and Antilochos. With the exception of Thoas, these are not the leading lights of the Achaeans—but they are those who are left, thanks to the spate of injuries suffered in book 11. As a scholiast notes, Poseidon calls them “young men” and they are the ones who are left. The tone and content of his speech is fascinating
Iliad 13.107-114
But now [the Trojans] are fighting far from the city among the hollow shops Thanks to the wickedness of our leader and the negligence of the army. They are not willing to defend the shift ships because they have been struggling With him—yet still, they are being killed alongside them. But even if it is totally true that the cause of this Is the hero son of Atreus, wide-ruling Agamemnon Because he dishonored swift-footed Peleus’ son, There is no way for us to hang back from war. Let’s repair this quickly—the minds of good men are surely reparable.”
What a speech! A scholion notes significant ambiguity in this final line because the verb ἀκεώμεθα does not have an object. A T scholion suggests it could be “the anger of Achilles, or the negligence for which he was reproaching them” (τὴν ἔριν ἢ τὴν μῆνιν ᾿Αχιλλέως, ἢ τὴν ἀμέλειαν, ἣν αὐτοῖς ὀνειδίζει, schol. T ad Hom. Il. 13.115c). The proverbial claim—that noble men have minds that are pliable—doesn’t make the matter any clearer, because it could refer to Achilles and Agamemnon, the Greeks who are holding back, or everyone. While I tend to prefer readings that preserve ambiguity, I think that the closest referent is ἡμέας (“us”), which puts the onus on the addressees without foreclosing other possibilities (e.g., the arguing jerks who started it all).
The language from the beginning of this passage is critical of the Greeks and their leadership and aims to claim common ground with the addressees while filling them with a sense of shame that it has gone this far. Poseidon is acting the part of an audience member who is fed up with action that has taken a different course than he expected. His intervention strains against “Zeus’ plan” and tries to realign the inverted action of this poem with the larger “superstory” (to use Rachel Lesser’s term) of the Trojan War. In this, we can imagine Poseidon in that role of divine voyeur, frustrated at the story he watches.
Amphora, MET: Poseidon and Victory, c 470 BCE
At the same time, he provides an interpretation of the events for the mortals. As a god, Poseidon has heard about Zeus’ plans—he just doesn’t care about them. Note that he does not mention divine will in this passage; instead, he focuses on the Achaean political drama. He claims that Agamemnon is to blame, which is strong language in the epic tradition, yet by lumping Achaean cowardice into the conversation, he makes the very reasonable—and persuasive—argument that the Achaean army is a lot more than one (or two) men. As an interpreter of the action of the poem, then, Poseidon passes judgment on all of the Achaeans and instrumentalizes his judgment as an act of persuasion.
Disguised as Kalkhas, Poseidon also picks a line of argumentation that will resonate with these youngest of heroes who have seen the actual best of the Achaeans sidelined by pettiness, rage, and actual martial injuries. In my reading now, Poseidon is an actor who has donned a persona to move mortals to action; at the same time, he is a performer who has taken on a role that may also speak to Homeric poetics. Can we imagine Poseidon here as echoing the choices for speeches made by Homeric singers and from this can we make deductions on how they shape and shift the content of each speech to persuade or otherwise shape audience reaction?
My intuition on this is yes. There may be a homology to explore between this scene and Thucydides famous description of how his speeches correspond to what needed to be said (or what was appropriate to the situation). One would also need to look at all of the disguised speeches in the Iliad with careful attention to the audiences targeted to explore this idea further. But Poseidon gave us a start. As a figure in a mask, interpreting the scene for us, Poseidon is an actor, a divine hypocrite (keeping in line with the original meaning of the Greek word). But the tension between the story he tells as Kalkhas and the story we see as the audience helps us understand the epic even more.
A Letter to Hippocrates: Ps.-Hipp. Epist. 23 (9.392–93 Littré)
“Democritus writes to Hippocrates on the nature of human beings:
“Hippocrates, all people should know the art of medicine, since it it is noble and also advantageous for life and it is a special possession of those people who have deep experience in education and argumentation. I think that the pursuit of wisdom is the sibling and roommate of medicine since wisdom frees the soul of suffering, and medicine rids the body of illnesses.”
“The way you address a patient requires some kind of a theory too. For, if you begin talking about payment, then something else occurs in every situation. You will leave the sick person with the kind of impression that you will abandon him and leave if there is no agreement and that you don’t care and you will not apply any relief in the present.
Therefore, you should not make an issue about payment. For we believe that this kind of thought is harmful when someone is sick, and even more so if the sickness is intense. For the swiftness of a sickness which does not provide ample time for changing your mind urges the one who practices medicine well not to seek profit but to think more of reputation. It is, therefore, better to rebuke patients who have been saved rather than to blackmail those who are facing ruin.”
“That was the time when Zeus rained over the whole earth
and his flood destroyed everything. Their towers
were thrown to the ground and the people
started to swim once they saw their own destruction.”
“This is the great flood in which “the floodgates of heaven”–by which, I mean the mind, “were opened and “the streams of the abyss”, which is really perception, “were closed.”
“Many shooting stars [are indications of] rain or wind and the wind or rain will originate from their directions. If the rays of the sun are thick together at sunrise or sunset, it might be a sign of rain.
It is also a sign when during sunrise the raise have the color of an eclipse. And also when there are clouds that are similar to the hair of wool—that’s a sign of rain. Many bubbles rising on the surface of rivers are signs of rain. And, generally speaking, when a rainbow appears around or through the light of the lamp, it means rain from south.”
“When a crow places its head on a rock which is washed by waves it is a sign of rain. Also: when it frequently dives down and flies around near the water, it is a sign of rain.”
